Capitol Men (60 page)

This rant about Reconstruction-era expense accounts was deeply hypocritical, of course, for even the worst allegations in the "Report on Public Frauds" could hardly be measured against the momentous fraud Tillman and his friends wished to perpetrate in disenfranchising thousands of South Carolina citizens; and one point seldom conceded—or ever mentioned—was that prior to the Civil War, state politicians tended to be wealthy landowners who had little need of government-provided supplies, travel costs, or even a salary.

Looking now to the future, Tillman demanded, "Can we not rise to the necessities of the occasion, and put into this Constitution such an Article in reference to suffrage as will guarantee, as far as the law can guarantee, to future generations that they shall have the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization and liberty in this State? How pitiable, how puerile, how ineffably, unutterably contemptible appear the personal ambitions and petty spites of men alongside of this grand and glorious purpose!"

In addition to Mississippi's example, the Tillmanites had for inspiration a pamphlet by a former state legislator named Edward McCrady Jr., bearing the innocuous title "The Necessity of Raising the Standard of Citizenship," which explained how certain simple proofs of citizenship could be legalized that would effectively deny the vote. McCrady, the father of the "eight box law," had outlined the danger of allowing even a significant black voting minority to exist, for fear it would at some point be exploited by whites in an unscrupulous coalition. An old-fashioned conservative in the mode of Wade Hampton, McCrady was known to disapprove of Tillman, but Tillman's convention seized upon many of McCrady's ideas for placing severe "citizenship" restrictions on the state's voters, such as rules concerning place of residency, literacy, and past criminal records. The crimes enumerated were those that blacks were more often accused of, such as burglary, arson, forgery, adultery,
bigamy, wife beating, fencing stolen goods, and sodomy. Curiously, murder, rioting, and lynching—more typically white crimes—were not listed. (The black delegates proposed that lynching be added to the list, but the resolution was not carried.)

The most controversial proposed rule was Mississippi's "understanding clause," the loophole that empowered local registrars to quiz voting applicants to see whether they "understood," and could explain to the registrar's satisfaction, a paragraph chosen from the state's constitution. Smalls, seeing the clause for what it was—a means of barring blacks from the polls while admitting any white—spoke out against it, calling instead for a straight-up literacy test. There were, as of the census of 1890, he said, a total of 102,657 white males over the age of twenty-one in South Carolina, and 132,949 black males. Of the whites, 13,242 were estimated to be illiterate; of the blacks, 58,086. Thus, if a fairly applied test kept all illiterate men from the ballot, the whites would reverse the blacks' voting majority in the state by about 15,000. What many delegates knew, however, was that since virtually all the white illiterates in the state belonged to the Tillmanite faction, the blacks of the state might still attain a majority if they managed to forge an alliance with moderate whites—the very coalition that had worried McCrady and that existed briefly in the decade's Southern Populist movement. As the black delegate James Wigg noted, "The doctrine so persistently taught that the interests of the negro and Anglo-Saxon are so opposed as to be irreconcilable is a political subterfuge; a fallacy so glaring in its inception, so insulting to Providence, so contrary to reason and logic of history, that one can scarcely refrain from calling in question either the sanity or honesty of its advocates." It was the truth of Wigg's statement, and the fear of just such a partnership, that made an across-the-board literacy test unacceptable to the Tillmanites.

Smalls warned that Tillmanite abuses of voting rights would be ultimately destructive: they would further alienate black South Carolinians, perhaps driving them away and creating labor shortages as did the Exodus of 1879, and they would reinforce the state's, and the region's, already glaring reputation for racial injustice. He added that since 1865 as many as fifty-three thousand blacks had been killed in the South, but no more than two or three whites had ever been held accountable for these deaths. In response, Tillman accused Smalls and other blacks of corruption and high-handedness during Reconstruction's "era of good stealing." Smalls vehemently denied the characterization, citing evidence that the charges against him, as enumerated in the "Report on Public
Frauds," had been trumped up. "I stand here the equal of any man," Smalls declared. "I started out in the war with the Confederates; they threatened to punish me and I left them. I went to the Union army. I fought in seventeen battles to make glorious and perpetuate the flag that some of you trampled under your feet. Innocent of every charge attempted to be made here today against me, no act of yours can in any way blur the record that I have made at home and abroad."

It was heartening that a resounding national reaction greeted Smalls's stand in the South Carolina convention. Letters and telegrams of approbation poured in from across the country, many daring to suggest that Smalls's eloquence had demolished the basis of the Tillmanites' assault on black rights. As one editorial noted of Smalls's "brilliant moral victory," white anxiety about blacks in politics "is not born so much of regard for their numbers as their intellectual ability. It is not Negro ignorance but Negro intelligence that is being feared."

This theory was conveniently demonstrated when "the Boat Thief" managed to turn the tables on the dominant party one more time. The Democrats had sought to establish codes of punishment in the new constitution for committing the social taboo of racial intermarriage. In response, Smalls counterproposed an amendment stating that any white person caught in cohabitation with a black person should be barred from holding public office and that any offspring from such a union should bear the father's name. And since it was common knowledge that a black man who dared even a romantic pass at a white woman was asking to be lynched, he suggested that a similar, but legal standard be made to apply to white men who sexually exploited black women. "The coons had the dogs up the tree for a change," laughed the
Columbia State,
for Smalls had successfully indicted a long tradition of misbehavior and hypocrisy among white males, and in doing so he had probably made every Democrat in the chamber squirm. His amendment was refused, but not before Tillman's convention was made to discuss and consider its ramifications.

The voting measures adopted by the convention gave the franchise to males over the age of twenty-one who had resided in the state for two years, their county one year, and their precinct four months. (These requirements were meant to set limits on black voters, who tended to be more transient.) A poll tax would be paid in May, six months before November elections. (This deadline preyed on farmers, for the late spring was a time when they were traditionally cash poor.) In addition, the convention approved both the literacy test and the "understanding
clause," to be applied at the registrar's discretion, although anyone who had paid taxes on $300 worth of property would be exempt. (The U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the "understanding clause" in an 1898 decision,
Williams v. Mississippi,
refusing to rule that it and other suffrage provisions were discriminatory. Similar clauses were duly enacted by Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina in 1900, Alabama and Virginia in 1901, Georgia in 1908, and Oklahoma in 1910.) The idea of a grandfather clause, requiring black registrants to prove they'd had an ancestor who was a registered voter, was dropped as unnecessary, and Tillman dismissed Robert Aldrich's suggestion that no black person ever be allowed to hold public office as inflammatory and likely to excite Northern opinion. Given the new restrictions on black voting, it was in any case now superfluous.

The Tillmanites got pretty much all they wanted from their convention, which approved the new constitution by a vote of 116 to 7. Ironically, for all their fulminations against the Reconstruction constitution of 1868, the Tillman convention had little choice but to retain many of its structural reforms. There was a moral in this. As Smalls had attempted to assert, establishing a new state constitution based on essentially undemocratic ideas flew in the face of basic good government. The fixation on race above all else, "the subject of subjects," unified regional law and politics but also rendered them perverse, hypocritical, and self-defeating. An example was the South's rejection of potentially beneficial federal assistance in education, for fear that it would arouse national concern about segregated schools. As the white politician Ellery Brayton, a witness to the Tillman revolution, observed with considerable foresight, strict discipline on the issue that mattered most tended to create closed societies in which debate and the airing of differences on other matters became inhibited; this corrupted the region intellectually, and probably morally as well.

When Smalls refused to sign the finished constitution, another delegate informed him that his travel expenses would not be paid if he did not affix his signature. "Then I'll walk home," he said. "I'd rather walk than put my name to a constitution with such an article on suffrage." Ever the Lincolnesque optimist, Robert Smalls walked out of the convention and did not stop. Almost immediately he embarked on a speaking tour in support of William McKinley, who would become the successful Republican candidate for president in 1896; Smalls used every stop on a tour that took him as far west as Kansas to describe the horrors of Tillmanism in South Carolina and to castigate the entire South
for efforts to nullify black participation in politics and the democracy at large.

Senator Shelby M. Collom of Illinois made a proposal that appealed to Robert Smalls. Completely legal, its goal was to reduce the South's proportional representation in Congress because so many of its citizens had been disenfranchised. This idea had been floated before, unsuccessfully, but Smalls loved its simple logic and thought it an ideal way of bringing the Southern states to task. In 1898, the Republican congressman Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana suggested that a 40 percent reduction in the Southern representation in Congress would adequately reflect the extensive disenfranchisement of Southern black citizens. During the South Carolina convention, the Tillman forces had actually agreed that they would willingly reduce the state's representation in the electoral college and in Congress, if necessary, because from their perspective, the ability to dominate state politics along racial lines meant far more than having a slightly larger voice in Washington.

So sweeping an initiative, however, so utterly sectional and punitive in character, was likely to go nowhere, given the prevailing mood of regional reconciliation. Americans were by now paying far more attention to foreign troublemakers than to homegrown ones like Pitchfork Ben Tillman, and the crises of the nation's cities, its powerful corporate trusts, and its restive masses of ethnic laborers had largely supplanted concern for the most vulnerable residents of the Southern Black Belt.

Even in the face of the post-Reconstruction hostility to black suffrage, Southern black voters continued to send black men to Congress, often from formidable black redoubts such as the Sea Islands and North Carolina's Second Congressional District, known as "the Black Second." Although North Carolina had been redeemed in 1870, the state sent four blacks to Congress from 1875 to 1900. Still, the overall trend was disheartening. The Forty-fourth Congress (1875–77) included eight black members, the maximum for the nineteenth century. After that, black participation fell off precipitously; no more than two at a time served in Congress during the 1880s, three were present for the Fifty-first Congress (1889–91), and from 1891 to 1901, no more than one participated.

The liveliest black North Carolinian to make it to Washington was probably James O'Hara, the son of a black mother and an Irish sea captain, who came to the Tarheel State in 1868 and ascended rapidly through state Republican ranks, serving two terms in Congress in the 1880s. His quick wit and sound legal mind won him the admiration of
his constituents but disparagement from many whites, who considered him "a mulatto with cheek a plenty." O'Hara lived up to his reputation in 1875, celebrating the passage of the Civil Rights Act by personally integrating the saloon of a famous steamboat, the
Cotton Planter.
Another strong-willed presence in Congress was the minister Jeremiah Haralson, elected from Alabama in 1874. An unlettered, straight-talking man who had once been auctioned as a slave, Haralson was described by the
Mobile Register
as "a burly Negro ... black as the ace of spades and with the brogue of the cornfield." He fell out of favor with voters in 1879–80 over his opposition to the Exoduster movement, although Haralson himself ultimately migrated west to Colorado, where he tried his hand at mining, among other schemes, and in 1916 met a grisly death, devoured by wild animals.

Probably the most distinguished black member of Congress in the latter half of the century was John Mercer Langston, great-uncle of the poet Langston Hughes. An Oberlin graduate, Langston became in 1854 the first black person to practice law in Ohio, and soon after, one of the first black Americans ever elected to public office, serving as the town clerk of Brownhelm, Ohio. He went on to have a superlative career, helping to raise black fighting units during the war and working for the Freedmen's Bureau, then serving as dean of the law school at Howard University, as minister to Haiti, and, in the 1880s, as president of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. Since high elective office was the one prize Langston had not attained, in 1888 he sought a congressional seat from Virginia's Fourth District. The campaign splintered black and white Republicans in the state; Langston's candidacy was opposed not only by Virginia's white Republican leader, Senator William Mahone, but by the influential spokesman Frederick Douglass. Langston and Douglass shared an enduring animosity. Douglass may have resented the life of relative privilege that Langston had enjoyed, while Langston was known to have sniped at Douglass over his handling of the Freedman's Bank debacle. In any case, this ill will motivated Douglass to write an open letter to voters in Langston's district, suggesting that the candidate sought status and influence without being truly devoted to the cause of racial progress. Langston was livid, although Douglass's missive, widely perceived as mean-spirited, galvanized support for Langston. He managed, however, to hold his seat in Congress for only one term.